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Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Fiona Adventures: Bit by a Snake

Happy Labor Day! So very thankful for a day off today, I took little Miss Fiona to the dog park. It's something we've been doing lately (and going on long walks) to try to wear her out so we can enjoy her a little more at home.Well, today, we were having a lovely time at the dog park. Chattin' it up with the other dog owners and watching her run herself ragged. (It's 3 hours later, and she's been asleep since we got home. This is good.) At one point, I glance behind the bench where I was sitting to check on her, and I see her playing with a little white terrier kinda dog. They looked fine, as they were playing with some kind of stick. Then, I looked again as I realized it might not have been a stick after all...Well, it wasn't a stick. In fact, it was a snake that didn't seem to take kindly to being batted back and forth between a small terrier kinda dog and a Fiona puppy. It was striking at one, then the other. And I saw it 'catch' on Fiona's neck. Twice. All this while I said rather calmly to the guy sitting on a nearby bench, "Oh, they're playing with a snake." We got up, and he threw Fiona towards me since she wouldn't come when I called her. She was having too much fun 'playing' with this new toy. And we got the smaller dog away too. By then, all the other dogs came over to see the new fun toy, and the other owners were all trying to keep their four-legged children away from this snake.

We got all the dogs away, and two of the guys worked together to pin it's head to the ground with a stick. One guy grabbed it near its head and carried it far away. During the pinning and carrying, they determined it was a rat snake. A constrictor, so not poisonous.

Fiona quickly forgot about that toy and moved on to racing around with the bigger dogs again. She seemed unfazed, so I wasn't worried about her. And even though the guys seemed pretty confident, I wanted to be sure. So I googled rat snakes on my Droid to make sure I didn't need to take her to visit her daddy at the vet. Google confirmed the picture of the type of snake we had encountered and that rat snakes are constrictors, so Fiona Jayne had nothing to be concerned about. The little terrier dog that she was playing with had cause for concern though. Even though the snake was only like 3.5 feet long, it might have been able to take down the little white dog had it been left to its own devices and not had Super Fiona to bat it around with him. :)We stayed at the dog park for another 45 minutes or so and had a friend from small group join us. And she's fine. Even snake bites don't faze our littlest girl. She's resilient.